In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 107-114 [Access article in PDF] A Comparative Study of Artistic Play and Zoukei-Asobi[Tables] "Artistic Play" and "Zoukei-Asobi" Recently, I found an article in Art Education which led me to believe that "artistic play" is not as popular among North America art educators as it is in Japan. 1 For Japanese art educators, especially at the elementary level, this word is well-known as (...) a key term. In Japanese we say "zoukei-asobi." "Zoukei" means "plastic arts activities" and "Asobi" means "playing." I recognized that the basic concept of "artistic play" has something in common with that of "zoukei-asobi." In this article I will identify this as "J-artistic play." The aim of this essay is to compare the meaning of "J-artistic play" by studying its use in Japan and the United States. The Curriculum Guidelines for Art Education in Japan Before considering J-artistic play, I should explain the national guideline for art education in Japan, since the objectives and contents of J-artistic play are prescribed by this guideline. We have had a national guideline since 1872 though this has changed drastically to resemble the American model after World War II. The subject corresponding to "Visual Art" in the elementary school is "Art and Handicraft (Zuga-Kousaku)." "Zuga" means drawing and painting, "Kousaku" means design and craft. The current guideline is divided into three parts (I-III) as shown in Table 1.The first shows a general goal of art education in the elementary school. The second describes the objectives and contents of each grade. The third indicates some key points of teaching for teachers. In the elementary school the curriculum sequence falls into three steps. The content is divided into the two areas ("Hyougen" and appreciation), and Hyougen is divided further into "artistic play" and "art-making." [End Page 107] [Begin Page 110]I should make some comments on Hyougen. In this guideline, Hyougen is used both as expression and representation. In traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, "expression, representation, and decoration" constitute a kind of trinity. The concept of J-artistic play was introduced into the national guidelines for art education in1977. 2 At first, this was available only for grades 1 and 2 in the elementary school, but since 1998 the concept has been extended to grades 1 and 6, as shown in Table 1. About the Property of J-artistic Play The activities in J-artistic play do not refer to any traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, or handicraft, nor are they derived from any specific art forms. In fact, the purpose for the introduction of this concept into the national guideline is to protect children from falling into conventional ways of representation as found in the traditional art forms. The promoters of J-artistic play thought that the preconceived ideas found in such existing art forms, such as painting might depress children's spontaneous and free expression. Some concepts from contemporary art, such as performance art, have also influenced J-artistic play.As Eliza Pitri said, "Play is spontaneous and voluntary. It is not obligatory but is freely chosen by the player." Though schooling is compulsory and a student cannot choose it independently, advocates of J-artistic insist that the character of "play" in the school curriculum should be an original and undifferentiated form of learning. One of the advocates of J-artistic play explains the significance of artistic play as an operation of integrated intelligence. 3 Artistic play is different in function from ordinary expressing activities. Ordinary expressing activity works with a blank drawing paper as sterile space, conditioned, virtual...laboratory. Contrarily artistic play works with raw materials, living places, and real environments, and is composed of organized and integrated formative activity by working on the subjects that make conditions for human, objective, and phenomenal interaction. Reorganization of intelligence and the opportunity for acquiring new intelligence are embedded in the activities that work interactively. Here we note that children will learn a reality from the interaction between the person and his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 107-114 [Access article in PDF] A Comparative Study of Artistic Play and Zoukei-Asobi[Tables] "Artistic Play" and "Zoukei-Asobi" Recently, I found an article in Art Education which led me to believe that "artistic play" is not as popular among North America art educators as it is in Japan. 1 For Japanese art educators, especially at the elementary level, this word is well-known as (...) a key term. In Japanese we say "zoukei-asobi." "Zoukei" means "plastic arts activities" and "Asobi" means "playing." I recognized that the basic concept of "artistic play" has something in common with that of "zoukei-asobi." In this article I will identify this as "J-artistic play." The aim of this essay is to compare the meaning of "J-artistic play" by studying its use in Japan and the United States. The Curriculum Guidelines for Art Education in Japan Before considering J-artistic play, I should explain the national guideline for art education in Japan, since the objectives and contents of J-artistic play are prescribed by this guideline. We have had a national guideline since 1872 though this has changed drastically to resemble the American model after World War II. The subject corresponding to "Visual Art" in the elementary school is "Art and Handicraft (Zuga-Kousaku)." "Zuga" means drawing and painting, "Kousaku" means design and craft. The current guideline is divided into three parts (I-III) as shown in Table 1.The first shows a general goal of art education in the elementary school. The second describes the objectives and contents of each grade. The third indicates some key points of teaching for teachers. In the elementary school the curriculum sequence falls into three steps. The content is divided into the two areas ("Hyougen" and appreciation), and Hyougen is divided further into "artistic play" and "art-making." [End Page 107] [Begin Page 110]I should make some comments on Hyougen. In this guideline, Hyougen is used both as expression and representation. In traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, "expression, representation, and decoration" constitute a kind of trinity. The concept of J-artistic play was introduced into the national guidelines for art education in1977. 2 At first, this was available only for grades 1 and 2 in the elementary school, but since 1998 the concept has been extended to grades 1 and 6, as shown in Table 1. About the Property of J-artistic Play The activities in J-artistic play do not refer to any traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, or handicraft, nor are they derived from any specific art forms. In fact, the purpose for the introduction of this concept into the national guideline is to protect children from falling into conventional ways of representation as found in the traditional art forms. The promoters of J-artistic play thought that the preconceived ideas found in such existing art forms, such as painting might depress children's spontaneous and free expression. Some concepts from contemporary art, such as performance art, have also influenced J-artistic play.As Eliza Pitri said, "Play is spontaneous and voluntary. It is not obligatory but is freely chosen by the player." Though schooling is compulsory and a student cannot choose it independently, advocates of J-artistic insist that the character of "play" in the school curriculum should be an original and undifferentiated form of learning. One of the advocates of J-artistic play explains the significance of artistic play as an operation of integrated intelligence. 3 Artistic play is different in function from ordinary expressing activities. Ordinary expressing activity works with a blank drawing paper as sterile space, conditioned, virtual...laboratory. Contrarily artistic play works with raw materials, living places, and real environments, and is composed of organized and integrated formative activity by working on the subjects that make conditions for human, objective, and phenomenal interaction. Reorganization of intelligence and the opportunity for acquiring new intelligence are embedded in the activities that work interactively. Here we note that children will learn a reality from the interaction between the person and his... (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of automatically extracting legal indices which express the important contents of legal documents. Legal indices are not limited to single-word keywords and compound-word keywords, they are also clause keywords. We approach index extraction using structural information of Japanese sentences, i.e. chunks and clauses. Based on the assumption that legal indices are composed of important tokens from the documents, extracting legal indices is treated as a problem of collecting chunks and clauses that contain as many important (...) tokens as possible. Each token is assigned a weight which is a statistical score, e.g. TF–IDF and Okapi BM25, to indicate its importance. The importance of a chunk or clause is determined based on the average weight of tokens included in that chunk or clause. Then, highly weighted chunks and clauses are recognized as the indices for legal documents. The experimental results on Japanese National Pension Act data show that our proposed method achieves better performance than TextRank, the most popular unsupervised method in extracting single-word and compound-word keywords. In addition, this approach is also applicable to extract clause keywords with high performance. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 32-36.

I attempt to develop further the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by Einstein and developed by Popper, Ballentine, etc. Two ideas are proposed in the present paper. One is to interpret momentum as a property of an ensemble of similarly prepared systems which is not satisfied by any one member of the ensemble of systems. Momentum is regarded as a statistical parameter like temperature in statistical mechanics. The other is the holistic assumption that a probability distribution is determined as (...) a whole as most likely to be realized. This is the same as the chief assumption in statistical mechanics, and maximum likelihood in classical statistics. These ideas enable us to understand statistically (1) the formalism of quantum mechanics, (2) Heisenberg's uncertainty relations, and (3) the origin of quantum equations. They also explain violation of Bell's inequality and the interference of probabilities. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown different developmental trajectories for object recognition of solid and non-solid objects. However, there is no evidence as to whether infants have expectations regarding certain attributes of objects, such as surface hardness, in the absence of tactile information. In the present study, we examined infants’ perception of the hardness of object surfaces from visually presented penetration events using the familiarization–novelty preference procedure. Experiment 1 showed that by 11 months old infants distinguished a relatively soft surface from a (...) crusty surface based on changes in the velocity of a moving object as the moving object penetrated the surface of the target object. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that infants were merely sensitive to differences in the velocity changes in the stimuli. (shrink)

The first “test-tube baby” in Japan was born in March, 1983 at Tohoku University Hospital. Since then ten years have passed. Table 1 indicares the clinical results of in vitro fertilization in this country. As it shows, more than 145 institutions perform IVF, and more than 3,000 babies have now been born using this procedure.According to the recommendations issued in October, 1983 by the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, IVF is defined as a medical practice for treating infertility, and (...) this procedure is performed only on married couples de jure. Eggs and embryos are not donated for IVF in Japan, nor does any “lending” or “leasing” of wombs take place. However, inFebruary, 1988 the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued new recommendations which allow clinical use of frozen embryos and eggs. The first baby from a frozen embryo was born in 1989, and 60 babies have been born to date. (shrink)

The first “test-tube baby” in Japan was born in March, 1983 at Tohoku University Hospital. Since then ten years have passed. Table 1 indicares the clinical results of in vitro fertilization in this country. As it shows, more than 145 institutions perform IVF, and more than 3,000 babies have now been born using this procedure.According to the recommendations issued in October, 1983 by the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, IVF is defined as a medical practice for treating infertility, and (...) this procedure is performed only on married couples de jure. Eggs and embryos are not donated for IVF in Japan, nor does any “lending” or “leasing” of wombs take place. However, inFebruary, 1988 the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued new recommendations which allow clinical use of frozen embryos and eggs. The first baby from a frozen embryo was born in 1989, and 60 babies have been born to date. (shrink)

As evidenced by high-throughput sequencers, genomic technologies have recently undergone radical advances. These technologies enable comprehensive sequencing of personal genomes considerably more efficiently and less expensively than heretofore. These developments present a challenge to the conventional framework of biomedical ethics; under these changing circumstances, each research project has to develop a pragmatic research policy. Based on the experience with a new large-scale project—the Genome Science Project—this article presents a novel approach to conducting a specific policy for personal genome research in (...) the Japanese context. In creating an original informed-consent form template for the project, we present a two-tiered process: making the draft of the template following an analysis of national and international policies; refining the draft template in conjunction with genome project researchers for practical application. Through practical use of the template, we have gained valuable experience in addressing challenges in the ethical review process, such as the importance of sharing details of the latest developments in genomics with members of research ethics committees. We discuss certain limitations of the conventional concept of informed consent and its governance system and suggest the potential of an alternative process using information technology. (shrink)

This paper proves that the division operation \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $\lfloor a/m\rfloor$\end{document} is provably total in the system \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $S_2^0$\end{document} of bounded arithmetic if and only if \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $m$\end{document} is of the form \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $2^n$\end{document} for some \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} (...) $n$\end{document}. (shrink)

Representational momentum is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when a moving object vanishes suddenly and the memory of its final or vanishing position is displaced forward in the direction of its motion. Many studies have shown evidence of various perceptual and cognitive characteristics of RM in various daily aspects, sports, development, and aging. Here we examined the longitudinal developmental changes in the displacement magnitudes of RM among younger and older nursery school children for pointing and judging tasks. In our experiments, (...) the children were asked to point at by their finger and judge the spatial location of the vanishing point of a moving stimulus. Our results showed that the mean magnitudes of RM significantly decreased from 5- to 6-year-old children for the pointing and judging tasks, although the mean magnitude of RM was significantly greater in the 5-year-old children for the pointing task but not for the judging task. We further examined the developmental changes in RM for a wide range of ages based on data from the present study and our previous study. This ad hoc examination showed that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in 5-year-old children than in adults for the pointing and judging tasks. Our findings suggest that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in young children than in adults and significantly decreased in young children through adults for the pointing and judging tasks. (shrink)